Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic Essay

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You sweep us away like a dream; we fade away suddenly like the grass" (4-5). Whites found comfort in God's sense of wrath, because they believed that God would protect them against potential slave insurrections, and act like a watch in the night, while slaves found comfort and protection in the night from God when they fled -- like the real Moses herself, Harriet Tubman. The mightiness and eternity of God dwarfed the created status of the slave-owner.

Status could be easily overturned, the Psalm warns, giving hope to slaves. Although whites might enjoy prosperity in the dwelling place of the plantation this was temporary: "In the morning it is green and flourishes; in the evening it is dried up and withered" (6). Those who show respect for God and who are truly pious will flourish in the long run, not simply Southerners who are cruel to their slaves and pray on Sundays, for God sees all "secret sins." While Southerners used religion to cause slaves to fear lying, cheating, stealing, and running away on the grounds this was immoral, slaves could see through such pretence, especially given the Psalm's celebration of those who work hard in labor and sorrow, and end their years "like a sigh" (9). Slaves knew it was their labor that was respected by the divine.

Religion was disseminated to slaves in two channels: on one hand it was transmitted officially by whites, but it was also transmitted through 'folk' means on the plantation itself.

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Slaves had their own interpretations of key passages: "Return, O LORD; how long will you tarry? be gracious to your servants" can simply point to a general understanding of the 'end of days,' or be understood by slaves that the end of days was night for their masters (13). In God's eyes, there was no status, all were servants of God -- and thus Southern arrogance in creating an artificial division between slaves and masters was seen as ungodly, and unholy and worthy of retribution. Southerners showed no grace to slaves, adversity is inherent in the status of God's people, and when slaves prayed: "Make us glad by the measure of the days that you afflicted us and the years in which we suffered adversity" they asked for a new way of life (15).

Despite his apparent hypocrisy, Clarke's protagonist who preaches the gospel to slaves, Charles Colcock Jones, seems sincere if misguided. For Clarke, the dwelling place of the earth is immaterial, but oppression is immaterial as well. But to the ears of slaves: ending lines of the Psalm however, are a demand to God for grace in the here and now: "Show your servants your works and your splendor to their children" (16). This demand for splendor is a demand for intervention. And slaves knew that God blesses those who work with their hands, not those who merely enforce such work: "May the graciousness of the LORD our God be upon us;….....

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